Word: zooey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1961-1961
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When they were child prodigies on radio, Zooey reminds her, Seymour always insisted that they shine their shoes "for the Fat Lady"?for all the lonely, unlovely, unseen but very real people "out there." Zooey's monologue soars: "Are" you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know?listen to me, now?don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah. buddy. It's Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy...
Astonishing Life. The reader may almost feel sorry that she has exchanged the mystic's mad glint for the calm smile of a mere lover of humanity. And the parable of the Fat Lady may seem intellectually underweight. But Zooey's lyric rant is not a seminarian's thesis; it is a gift of love received from Seymour and transmitted to a distraught, prayer-drunk, 20-year-old girl. Apart from questioning the depth of this message, critics?notably Alfred Kazin, who apologizes solemnly for having to say it?have suggested that the Glass children are too cute...
Some readers also object to the book's italicized talkiness. But the talk, like the book itself, is dazzling, joyous and satisfying. Holden Caulfield was a gentle heart who lacked the strength to survive; Zooey and his sister in the end are harried but whole. Above all, by sheer force of eye and ear?rather than by psychologizing, which he detests?Salinger has given them, like Holden, an astonishing degree of life, a stunning and detailed air of presence. So real are the Glasses in fact (an American student in Venice remembers that some one called him excitedly from...
...addressed on the street by a stranger, and his picture has not appeared on a dust jacket since the first two printings of Catcher (it was yanked off the third edition at his request). He has refused offers from at least three book clubs for Franny and Zooey, and has not sold anything to the movies since Hollywood made a Susan Hayward Kleenex dampener of his Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut...
...from old readers of mine who have somewhere picked up the bogus information that I spend six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution." One source of bogus information is the author himself; in the jacket blurb for Franny and Zooey, which he wrote himself, he says with coy fraudulence that "I live in Westport with my dog." The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years. But to disprove such rumors and humors involves infiltrating a distant-early-warning system equipped...